A malfunctioning cooling system part on the International Space Station may require an astronaut spacewalk to fix it if the team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston can't get the system back up and running, according to NASA officials. “Any time you have something like this, it's good news-bad news,” said NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio in a video-recorded interview on the agency's site. “Of course, the bad news is, the station's having problems and we have to go out and do a repair.

Live streaming video by Ustream While you are pigging out on a turkey dinner here on Earth this Thanksgiving, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station will be enjoying their own Thanksgiving meal -- more than 250 miles above our planet. But is a Thanksgiving meal in space any good? On Wednesday morning, you can find out. Astronaut Tom Marshburn --veteran of two space missions-- will discuss the Thanksgiving menu with Vickie Kloeris, the agency's manager of the station's food system, in a live broadcast.

With her long blond ponytail floating above her inside the International Space Station, astronaut Karen Nyberg calmly explains the challenges of quilting in weightlessness. "Now that I've tried my hand sewing in space," she said in a video released Thursday by NASA, "I can say one thing with certainty: It's tricky. " As if being a mechanical engineer and astronaut isn't significant enough, the avid quilter brought sewing supplies including fabric, scissors, thread, five needles (but no pins)

As audiences flock to see "Gravity," it is a reminder of the eternal wonders of space travel and the longing that deeper mysteries may be answered from the other side of the Earth's atmosphere. The news Thursday of the death of Scott Carpenter, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts and the second American to orbit the Earth, perhaps brought such flights of interstellar fancy crashing back to a too-human reality. Carpenter was 88. When John Glenn was launched into space for the first orbital mission, it was Carpenter who was heard saying, "Godspeed, John Glenn.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - I was inept at moonwalking. My rocket was a dud. And I crashed the space shuttle. Fortunately, I was just an astronaut wannabe and not the real deal. But it's as close as this middle-aged space geek is going to get. That geekiness, inspired by IMAX documentaries on space and news coverage of NASA's final shuttle launch in 2011, was what brought me to Adult Space Academy. The trip was a gift from my wife. The three-day program is among more than a dozen versions of Space Camp, which the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville created more than 30 years ago to give visitors a taste of what it's like to train as an astronaut.

"Gravity" is out of this world. Words can do little to convey the visual astonishment this space opera creates. It is a film whose impact must be experienced in 3-D on a theatrical screen to be fully understood. Though the strong work of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney - the only two actors who appear on camera - is essential to what the film accomplishes, the great lure of "Gravity" is the way director Alfonso Cuarón, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber have collaborated to make us feel we're stranded in outer space ourselves, no questions asked.

A spacecraft blasts off from Earth, zips by the moon and nine days later rendezvous with an asteroid that has been neatly bagged and placed in a lunar orbit. Those are just some of the highlights from NASA's new Asteroid Redirect Mission concept video. The space agency released a video this week depicting how it might get an astronaut within arm's reach of an asteroid, then chip off a few chunks from its surface and bring them home to Earth. QUIZ: How much do you know about asteroids?

C. Gordon Fullerton waited years for his chance to go into space but less than six minutes after the space shuttle Challenger took off in 1985, he was starting to rethink it. One of the Challenger's three main engines suddenly shut down and Fullerton, the mission's commander, didn't know whether the others would follow. "Absolutely, with no warning - kapow! - there was an immediate drop in acceleration," he later told reporters. "The red light came on, and there we were. " Fullerton and pilot Roy Bridges immediately dumped a load of surplus fuel, worked the two remaining engines harder, and maneuvered the Challenger into orbit just 45 miles lower than planned.

The barest details of Luca Parmitano's near-drowning in space are harrowing enough: The Italian astronaut's spacesuit helmet began filling with water as he floated outside the International Space Station. Now, Parmitano has published a first-person account on the European Space Agency website that brings the chilling ordeal to life. In an unprecedented malfunction, Parmitano's suit and helmet began to fill with about 1 to 1.5 liters of leaked water, officials said at the time. The floating liquid soon blocked the astronaut's ears, nose and sight, forcing officials to cut the spacewalk from roughly six hours to 1 hour and 32 minutes, the shortest in space station history.

When astronaut Luca Parmitano's helmet suddenly began filling with water as he floated outside the International Space Station, NASA officials said they'd never seen such a malfunction before. Now, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy explains in a video what happened to make his Italian partner's helmet leak. Parmitano, a European Space Agency astronaut who had become Italy's first spacewalker a week before, was roughly an hour into the July 16 exercise when he said his head felt "really wet. " Even as the team called off the spacewalk, liquid bubbles filled his helmet, ears and nose, even blocking his ability to speak.